When Broadway musicals move to the big screen, they usually get Hollywood stars for the marquee — regardless of whether those stars know how to sing and dance. But when Clint Eastwood decided to direct "Jersey Boys," based on the Tony Award-winning smash that tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the first place he looked for actors was the stage.

In the film, which hits theaters Friday, June 20, Frankie Valli is played by John Lloyd Young, who originated the role on Broadway and draws on the experience of 1,300 performances as the falsetto-singing pop star of the '60s and '70s. Many of Young's co-stars also come from theater, and while the role of Mob boss Gyp DeCarlo did go to Christopher Walken, that isn't a singing part.

Young has one other feature film to his credit, a comedy called "Oy Vey! My Son Is Gay!!" He also has appeared on TV's "Glee" and released a solo album of '60s R&B called "My Turn ..."

Question: What do we get to see in "Jersey Boys" the movie that we didn't see onstage?

Answer: On film you're watching someone so closely that you really see into them and see into their psyche. Things that aren't necessarily big red-letter moments. Even just the subtle way that I got to exist in certain scenes gives you a deeper insight into him psychologically than you might get onstage, where it's sort of bullet points from his career. ...

In the stage play, Frankie's daughter you only meet once. You barely get to know her. In the movie you see her as a toddler, at 11 years old and then at 17, so you get to understand Frankie Valli's relationship to a daughter, and she gets to understand him as a parent.

A: He's been on the other end of the camera for so many years as an actor that he kind of has vowed to correct every wrong that he ever experienced at the hand of a director. So everything he does with his actors is informed by what didn't work with him as an actor, and then, of course, what did.

For example, he worked with a Western director at one point. They were having trouble with the horses, and the director realized it was because when he yelled "action," the horses got spooked. So the director would instead say, "OK, let's go ahead." But Clint told me that he realized actors also tense up when a director yells "action." So Clint has a very gentle way of starting the action of a scene. He just says, "All right, go ahead," in a very calm way, and the actors sometimes don't even know that the cameras have started rolling.

Q: You've done a lot of stage work, including "Les Miserables" in Los Angeles. After Frankie Valli, what was your second favorite role?

A: It was a production of the Chaim Potok novel "The Chosen." If you saw the movie, Robby Benson played the heir to the Hasidic rabbi of the neighborhood. It was a period drama, and I did a theater production of that with Theodore Bikel as my father. I was really engaged by that performance. I deeply had to transform, dialect and physically, and it was really satisfying for me as an actor to do that. And that production is how the casting directors of what became "Jersey Boys" on Broadway discovered me.

A: Frankie Valli's sound was sort of a revolutionary thing to do in the early '60s, which was to take a voice and double it on itself, to record him twice and run the two recordings right next to each other. It gave it this metallic, exciting quality, especially with his falsetto, that was a sound that was then replicated after that.

Clearly Frankie Valli wasn't the only singer singing in falsetto, but he certainly brought it to the forefront in pop music that I think paved the way for other really famous falsetto groups like Chicago, the Bee Gees, Queen and Supertramp.

Q: You're also a visual artist. You had a show called "Food for Thought" with a bejeweled Spam can and a fabulously funny visual pun on "the Tonys." So are you an Andy Warhol aficionado?

A: I'm clearly deeply taken with Andy Warhol, with artists like Tracey Emin. I love artists with a heavy tinge of mischief, so I definitely have found myself emulating that.

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.